I spoke at the IoT Evolution Conference, which ran from August 17-20, in Las Vegas. The conference was all about IoT (“Internet of Things”) topics. See http://www.iotevolutionexpo.com. My talk was “Introduction to Swarm Intelligence for IoT”.

I estimate there were about 600 attendees at IoT Evolution. Like most technical conferences, the audience was overwhelmingly male. But unlike many technical conferences, the attendees at IoT Evolution were extremely varied in their job roles — CEOs, sales managers, engineers, business development people, and so on.

The Expo part of the event had representation by big companies (IBM, Cisco, AT&T, Intel, Oracle, etc.) as well as small startup companies and everything in between. I’d say the Expo had about 60 booths.

My impression from IoT Evolution is that people aren’t quite sure exactly what IoT is. The classic example of IoT is placing sensors on all the devices in a home so that those devices can communicate with each other and be more efficient. But, to be honest, I’m not excited by the prospect of my oven talking to my shower. But there are other IoT scenarios that really intrigue me.

It seems as if most of the companies represented at IoT Evolution were there to see what other companies are doing in the IoT space. And that’s not a bad thing. I suspect that companies fear that someone will come up with an IoT killer app, and so they want to stay informed. I’m not so sure there is an IoT killer app, but time will tell.

I had a good time. I learned a lot and came back to work with renewed energy. The event was at Caesars Palace, which isn’t one of my favorite places (a bit overpriced in my opinion), but I’ve been to conferences in far worse venues.

The bottom line is that I thought IoT Evolution was a good use of my time, and I hope to speak there again in 2016. If you’re involved with IoT, I recommend that you investigate the IoT Evolution events (there are several) to see if attending might be useful.